All over the globe, Magento merchants and other eCommerce business owners are marking the start of the holiday season by putting one major (probably red) marker on their calendar: THE BLACK FRIDAY. These are some helpful tips to help you set up your eCommerce store, SEO & PPC strategy and make important hosting adjustments so that this time goes as smoothly as possible.

Prepare your Magento store for Black Friday

You should think carefully about how your Magento store will function.

You can streamline traffic by creating a separate Black Friday page in your catalog. You can also use catalog prices rules to streamline your traffic. Catalog price rules will show discounts before the product is added to the shopping basket. Cart price rules, as their name implies, will apply discounts once the item has been added to the shopping bag. We recommend the first option as buyers don’t like surprises when it comes to their expected price. If you do decide to use coupon codes, ensure that your rules are clear and simple for all visitors who visit your store.

You can decide the pricing structure that is most advantageous for you, depending on your goals and plans. It is easiest to set the percentage or fixed amount across the entire category. However, you can also define separate conditions for specific products, attributes or attribute sets within your Magento administration.

 

Inventory, Shipping & Logistics

Make sure your inventory management is in order. You need to make sure that your inventory management is on point, regardless of whether Magento has access to information about the stock levels of your products from other business systems.

Make sure your shipping methods are correctly set up. You can use Magento’s flat, free, or out-of-the box shipping rates . Make sure you are clearly communicating your costs to your customers. These “added” costs can have a significant impact on your final sales.

Reevaluate your logistics management. Your eCommerce logistics should be able keep up with the growing number of online sales. You can scale your service with your logistic partner or your own logistics to meet the demand, but not overleverage during this busy period.

Last but not least, do not leave your Magento store alone during this time. You should not add any new features or add another brand to your Magento store during this time. Before the first sales push, your site should be in complete code freezing phase These activities will only be available for a brief time before the holiday season begins.

Black Friday: Prepare your SEO Strategy

SEO is a key component of any long-term strategy. However, it’s important to prepare Meta-information like Meta Title, Meta Keywords and Meta Description. This will make a difference in how your landing page appears on SERP (along with many other sites).

Our SEO expert Mario Mioc has many helpful tips for you on this topic.

To get ahead, prepare your landing pages before the Black Friday sales. After you have thoroughly audited and indexed your technical SEO, you will be able to rank high in the SERP. There are many other factors to consider, including site authority, backlinks and age of your site domain, site linking (to and from Black Friday landing pages), social media shares and Core Web Vitals, and technical SEO.

To speed up the process for indexing your website, submit it to your Google Search Console using these steps:

1. Google Search Console
2. Navigate to the URL inspection instrument
3. In the search bar, paste the URL that you would like Google to index.
4. Wait for Google’s URL to be checked
5. Click on the “Request indexing” button

Another option is to have a permanent Black Friday page. After the sales period ends, will remove the page from the Google Index. This will allow you to create a page that is well-known and should be updated each year with the products you are selling. This tactic should be used, but you must ensure that your URL is neutral and relevant every year.

The best solution is to use

domain.com/black-friday

Instead of

domain.com/black-friday-2021

Returning to the beginning, to ensure that your metadata is correct, you will need to:

1. Conduct a thorough keyword research
2. Based on your findings in step 1, choose the best combination for your keywords (high keyword density + high search volume).
3. Do not miss the chance to niche down with long-tail keywords
4. Instead of using the generic Black Friday keywords, personalize metadata
5. Prepare your data by imagining yourself as your customer. We all know who our buyers are and what they are interested in.
6. CTA phrases should be used in both your Meta Title (and Meta Description)
7. Include questions in your Meta Description. Although it doesn’t rank, this can have a significant impact on your CTR.

 

Before Black Friday, communicate with your hosting provider

Rethink your priorities if your hosting provider isn’t on your speed dial during this time. We’re not making fun of it, but we asked our top hosting providers for their tips and tricks to help you avoid urgent emails or panic calls about a “crashed” website.

Neil Jarvis, Marketing Manager at Akoova suggested that you take into consideration previous data:

• What happened last year?
• How did you handle the increase in traffic to your site?
• Do you expect a similar amount of traffic in the new year?

Considering the traffic volume is likely to receive and communicating this to your hosting provider will enable them to create a scaling profile that suits your specific requirements.

It is also important to discuss with your hosting provider the planned emails campaigns that you will be running during this time. You need to know the exact dates, times and expected effects of email campaigns on your site.

Even the most powerful players in eCommerce had their (literal!) failures in 2018. These included J.Crew and Lululemon, Walmart and Ulta. They didn’t put enough effort into their site’s framework to handle increased traffic. Let us all learn from their mistakes.

Proper communication, and timely communication, will enable your hosting provider understand your requirements and offer you the horizontal and scaling options of your store.

Black Friday: Set up the right PPC strategy

It’s obvious that your PPC channels will allow you to grab the market oversaturated. Lucija Kovacevic is a PPC specialist who works with our clients. She has some suggestions for how to not burn your budget during this period.

Budgets and Bids

Black Friday will see increased traffic and increased competition. It is important to adjust budgets and bid more often , but it is also important to be aware that you could get into a bidding war which could disrupt your ROAS.

To meet the demands of customers who plan ahead for their purchase, increase your budget for the sale. This increases brand awareness. You can be sure that your ads won’t stop running too soon by increasing your budget. We have already written blogs about how to gradually increase your budget in order to reduce spending on useless search terms.

Keywords, Ad Copy, & Landing Page

It is crucial to plan ahead in order to make the strategy work. It doesn’t suffice to increase budgets for existing ads. You need to create BlackFriday-specific campaigns. Plan a campaign that focuses on the products you choose.

In your ad copy, and on the landing page, include relevant keywords. A landing page copy should be aligned with the text of your ads. Black Friday reference is a good way to emphasize the seasonal promotion or offer.

You can also use custom extensions for Black Friday or Countdowns. To increase your subscriber base before the Black Friday sale begins, you can create a similar countdown page.

 

Black Friday will be marked by the countdown function, which counts down the remaining days and how many products remain in stock.

Audience

Remarketing is powerful even in these situations. Retarget customers who have abandoned carts or converted to your product. Customers with a higher user value should be bid more.

It would be great to prepare an email marketing newsletter that gives buyers a preview of what will be in the Black Friday sales. It’s great to show appreciation for repeat customers by giving them early access to Black Friday sales (or the additional discount).

To reach customers who are most likely to be matched with your brand or product, create lookalike audiences.

Analyze and Optimize

It is crucial to keep track of all metrics that are relevant to your website. This will allow you to gather all relevant data and give you a clear view of campaign performance. You will be able, using the data you have gathered, to identify what was successful and what can be improved next year.

It is also important to create a custom track for the Black Fridaycampaign in order to make real-time decisions, and not retroactively.

Prepare and execute!

Black Friday campaigns are more successful if they are planned and prepared in advance. Research shows that Black Friday sales are more successful when retailers begin to sell in November.

What else can you say? Get ready to prepare for the biggest sales event of the year. Good luck!

source https://inchoo.net/ecommerce/how-to-get-ready-for-black-friday/